Planning Strategies in an Age of Active Citizenship: A Post-structuralist Agenda for Self-organization in Spatial Planning

Civic initiatives in spatial development are on the rise. Whereas for a long time they were just a fringe movement, sometimes even a stand in the way of planned urban development, civic initiatives today are increasingly seen as valuable strategies for urban development. So far, however, when dealing with citizens, spatial planning has mostly focused on strategies for citizen involvement through participatory planning. In participatory planning, citizens can exert influence on goals set by governmental agencies, through procedures and frameworks that are set by the same governments and planners. This often results in disciplinary processes of thematic, procedural, and geographical inclusion that leave little room for creativity and the unexpected. Civic initiatives, on the contrary, are issue-oriented projects serving a specific but dynamic community interest, which does not have to be related to any ongoing public policy. They emerge from civil society spontaneously, are often unpredictable, dynamic, and multiplicit. Civic initiatives are at odds and hard to fit within the constraints of participatory planning. Together with an ongoing diversification in society, decentralization, dispersion of power, and increasing resource interdependency (e.g. land, property, knowledge, competences, capital, authority), the emerging practice of civic initiatives in spatial development, pose serious challenges to contemporary spatial planners. Planning strategies that answer to the dynamics of civic initiatives, meeting the complexity of an age of active citizenship, have so far been seriously underdeveloped. Reasoning from the perspective of emerging civic initiatives themselves, the thesis addresses three research questions: (i) Under what conditions do civic initiatives emerge? (ii) How do such initiatives gain robustness and resilience? (iii) What planning strategies are developed in, and in response to, these initiatives? Answers to these questions are used to explore potential and adequate strategies in dealing with civic initiatives – beyond the inclusionary and disciplinary confines of participatory planning approaches. To operationalize this civic initiative’s perspective the notion of “self-organization” is used. Coming from complexity theory, self-organization stands for a process of becoming in which order spontaneous emergences out of unordered beginnings. This notion is complemented by two other notions, coming from post-structuralist thoughts. These are “translation” from actor-network theory and “individuation” from assemblage theory. Just like self-organization, these notions address processes of becoming in a complex and non-linear environment. Together they from a theoretical framework with which the becoming of individual civic initiatives can be mapped. By applying this theoretical framework in multiple case study research, empirical insights are gathered in three different institutional contexts. Cases cover Denmark (co-housing initiatives), England (business improvement districts) and the Netherlands (civic initiatives in Almere). Based on the theoretical and empirical insights developed in this research, the doctoral thesis argues toward a planning strategy that does fit the age of active citizenship